‘The Place Beyond the Pines,’ Directed by Derek Cianfrance

Video In this Anatomy of a Scene, the director Derek Cianfrance narrates his film’s opening sequence.

By A. O. SCOTT

March 28, 2013

“The Place Beyond the Pines,”Derek Cianfrance’s new movie, reveals the scale of its ambitions by slow and patient accretion. The film starts out as the modest tale of a small-time carnival performer — a motorcycle stunt rider — who turns to crime for misguided but nonetheless semi-admirable reasons, and in the early scenes you might mistake it for an earnest, locavore indie melodrama.

Which it is, only bigger, longer and elevated to a place on the border between grandeur and grandiosity. Set in and around Schenectady, N.Y. (whose Mohawk name is evoked in the title), “The Place Beyond the Pines” has a lot to say about class, manhood and the curious operations of fate, themes that Mr. Cianfrance articulates with blunt conviction and, at times, impressive artistry. He goes on too long: the three-part story, spread over nearly two and a half hours, represents a triumph of sympathetic imagination and a failure of narrative economy. But if, in the end, the film can’t quite sustain its epic vision, it does, along the way, achieve the density and momentum of a good novel.

Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes as parents and former lovers in “The Place Beyond The Pines,” directed by Derek Cianfrance.

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If it were a book, the name on the spine might be Russell Banks or Joyce Carol Oates, since, like them, Mr. Cianfrance is drawn to blue-collar landscapes of the northeastern United States. This Schenectady, seen at two different moments 15 years apart, feels like a place that time forgot, far away from the tumult of politics or commercial popular culture. It’s a small town of beat-up houses and late-night diners whose citizens dwell under film-noir shadows of violence and corruption.

Luke (Ryan Gosling), first glimpsed as a tattoo-covered torso striding away from the camera, shows up with his seedy, itinerant fairground crew and encounters Romina (Eva Mendes), with whom he had a fling the last time he was in town. When he finds out that his wild oat has sprouted into a baby named Jason, Luke decides to stick around, insisting that he and Romina and Jason can be a family, even though Romina lives with another man (Mahershala Ali). To win her over and support his child, Luke, with the help of a local mechanic (the excellent Ben Mendelsohn), starts robbing banks, speeding away on his motorcycle.

The second section of “The Place Beyond the Pines” is about another man, a police officer named Avery (Bradley Cooper), who is also the father of a baby boy. The third panel of what Mr. Cianfrance has described as a triptych is about the two sons (grown into Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan). I’m reluctant to say more, less out of a fear of spoilers than out of respect for the film’s structural audacity.

Ryan Gosling in "The Place Beyond the Pines."

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Mr. Cianfrance’s previous movie, “Blue Valentine,” with Mr. Gosling and Michelle Williams, was built around a chronological trick. It shuttled back and forth in time between the beginning and the end of the main characters’ relationship. The most radical aspect of “The Place Beyond the Pines” is its relentless linearity, the way it tells its story without foreshadowing or flashing back or resorting to other conventional shortcuts. Watching it is refreshing and absorbing partly because it is rare for a film to show this kind of confidence in its own narrative momentum, which is also a gesture of faith in the audience’s willingness to pay attention.

Your attention is especially rewarded by the work of Mr. Gosling and Mr. Cooper, who offer contrasting studies in tragic, shortsighted masculine intensity. Mr. Gosling’s cool self-possession — the only thing he was allowed to display in “Drive” — is complicated, made interesting, by hints of childlike innocence and vulnerability. In the middle of stickups, Luke raises his voice almost to a shriek, and his dream of paternal fulfillment is almost pathetically naïve.

His most serious flaw may be his commitment to a romantic view of himself as an outlaw with a noble cause. Avery, the son of a judge (Harris Yulin), is threatened above all by his own righteous arrogance, which undermines his relationship with his wife (Rose Byrne) and clouds his professional prospects. Mr. Cooper, once again showing himself to be a restless and resourceful talent, plays Avery as a handsome, charming winner who is nonetheless very difficult to like.

Video The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews "The Place Beyond the Pines."

The sins of these two complicated fathers are visited on their sons, and it is in the third-act swirl of revenge and redemption that “The Place Beyond the Pines” goes wrong, trading its grit and psychological insight for overwrought, capitalized emotions. As the movie wears on, you start to notice Mr. Cianfrance’s overreliance on certain shots (like the long, behind-the-head follow) and the insistent, stabbing squall of Mike Patton’s otherwise effective score. (Speaking of music, the movie ends with a Bon Iver song that would have been more powerful if it had not been used in a similar way in “Rust and Bone.”)

The failures of this film are the product of its aspirations, which makes it easy to forgive, even though the disappointment is hard to shake. The movie is a little like both its anguished protagonists, going wrong in the name of vanity and love.